Many telecommunications network services providers and cable TV operators are showing significant interest in provisioning Video-on-Demand (VOD) services. Moreover, major telecommunications equipment manufacturers are promoting diverse equipment for providing VOD or near-VOD services. These services are expected to grow significantly over time. Primary application areas include on-demand home entertainment, distance learning and training, and news-on-demand. These services require significant capital investments. For example, in near-VOD a server may broadcast a copy of a popular movie every five minutes. Thus, if the length of the movie is 100 minutes, the network would carry simultaneously 20 copies of the movie, which would require significant bandwidth resources.
Various topics related to VOD have been explored. For example, the papers by S. Ramesh, I. Rhee, and K. Guo, “Multicast with Cache (Mcache): An Adaptive Zero-Delay Video-on-Demand Service”, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 11, 440-456, 2001, by B. Li and J. Liu, “Multirate Video Multicast Over the Internet: An Overview”, IEEE Network, 24-29, January/February 2003, and by K. A. Hua, M. A. Tantaoui, and W. Tavanapong, “Video Delivery Technologies for Large-Scale Deployment of Multimedia Applications”, Proceedings of the IEEE, 92, 1439-1451, September 2004 discuss various VOD delivery technologies that are expected to be practical for large-scale problems. Nevertheless, even with effective VOD delivery technologies, the bandwidth requirements for VOD would be large. Since the available bandwidth on the network links is limited, an effective method of allocating the bandwidth of each link among the various VOD programs that are carried on the link is needed. Current state-of-the-art systems use ad-hoc heuristics and communications network managers' experience for VOD bandwidth allocation. Optimization-based methods for the simultaneous optimal allocation of bandwidth on all links of the VOD network would significantly enhance automated systems for managing VOD networks.